Thursday 21st August 2014

4288/17207
Had my first proper Edinburgh lie-in of the Fringe. I have generally been waking up at about 8am (which after going to bed at 2am is something of a problem). But today I was in bed til about 2.30pm and then too zonked out to do anything at all. I sat in the lounge in a daze failing to get work done, even failing to concentrate on watching TV.
I thought this might be a problem for the gig and indeed I did feel disorientated and a bit faint throughout the first half hour, worrying that I might do an actual Tommy Cooper. But a very friendly crowd lifted me and I managed to find the reserves to dance like a lunatic at the end (spoiler alert).
A fairly weird coincidence has occurred though. Last night in the bar, I met a man who had seen my show and who thought (spoiler alert) that the big knitted boy I had seen in the window of a house in Hertfordshire might well have been his aunt’s. We checked the details and it seems almost certain that this was her house and her lanate boy (though he doesn’t remember her having the parking sign at the back of the house). I mean it seems unlikely there would be two people in the Harpenden region with massive flaxen children in their window. Sadly his aunt has died recently, but it seems that she wasn’t a serial killer and the doll was not alive, just that she was a little bit eccentric (not his words). In a further weird coincidence her nephew is a tech at Edinburgh who will be stepping in to cover for my absent technician on the weekend, so he was at the desk tonight to learn the few cues. I wondered if I would meet someone who recognised the doll, but didn’t expect it to be someone working on the show. What are the chances of that?
Unless this guy has been sent by his “aunt” to apprehend me and this is all part of the spooky plot to have me mummified and placed in a woollen sarcophagus.
I am looking forward to getting home, but now, with just three of each show to go, it doesn’t feel like a purple-headed mountain to climb. Tomorrow I will return to London for about an hour and a half as I fly with Virgin Atlantic, there and back, to do two gigs at 30,000 feet. I won’t be allowed to stay in London though, but maybe I can escape and return back to Liono and Smithers and the relative safety of Shepherd’s Bush. Sure I might get stabbed there, but at least there is no danger of the kind of evisceration that the Fringe can deliver. Hopefully Charley Boorman can cover for me if I make my Great Escape.